The extraction of oil from sands by the oil industry can leave behind contaminated slurry like substance that is called tailing.  This tailing is a common problem in the oil sands of Canada.  This tailing contained mostly clay and sand and it also had some water in it as well so that it was kind of a clay slurry substance.  This substance was originally placed in a tailing pond, but Canadian regulations required that this mixture needed to be reclaimed rather then simply being placed in tailing ponds.  Since the oil industry needed to be able to do this as inexpensively as possible to make the oil extraction process economically feasible they needed a solution and Komax came to their rescue with their Hi-Pass Produced Water Mixer.

Komax was able to take one of our patented technologies and modify the Hi-Pass sludge mixer and adjust this technology so that it worked and was able to treat these effluent tailing ponds.  We created what it called the Hi-Pass Produced Water Mixer to reclaim this clay slurry.  Since our patented Hi-Pass Produced Water Mixer doesn’t have any motors, compressors or moving parts in the mixer, it was a very effective and cost efficient way of reclaiming the tailing which made removal of the oil from the sands of Canada economically feasible.

This mixer is placed in a pipeline and then uses a polymer that is inserted upstream from their mixer and the elements in their mixer creates a shearing action that mixes the polymer with the clay slurry and induce a chemical reaction that is able to treat the effluent tailings.  The elements that are in the mixer make certain that no clogging occurs during the process and the clay slurry goes through the pipe with no real drop in pressure or flow.  Our Hi-Pass Produced Water Mixer was able to economically and quickly treat the effluent tailings.